Truffle Butter Risotto

 Food Prep and Cooking:

Nick:

Well, we messed this one up right off the bat. The instructions have you pour four cups of reconstituted vegetable stock into the rice pan, then simmer it for 17 minutes; I guess we don't know what simmering is, because the rice plumped up and got nice and done, but we still had 3 3/4 cups of vegetable stock, so we ended up with very high end vegetable stock soup. Also, the truffle butter and cream cheese didn't melt. (The parm, oddly enough, did.) 

Katie:

We ditched the peas and mushrooms. If peas and mushrooms are a small portion of something someone has made me, I can deal but I'm cooking so I wanted to ditch them.

I, too, thought I knew what simmering was. Other than that disaster, the rest of the directions were fairly easy to follow though as someone not very comfortable at all in the kitchen, having terms like "medium high heat" mean very little to me. 

Post meal thoughts

Nick:

For high-end vegetable stock soup, this was pretty good. The butter, cream cheese and parm were very savory, but the huge amount of vegetable stock made it less savory than I would have expected from risotto. We didn't end up with a risotto, but what we did end up with was tasty. Don't tell my doctor I ate all that fat, though. To improve this dish, I would either, umm, actually prepare it right, or maybe chop the carrots smaller to make them bite-sized and make it into a real soup. Oh, yeah, there's carrots in this - they're fine; they're as much an afterthought when you're eating them as they are here. 

Katie:

Once I realized we'd not properly simmered the risotto, I told myself that if it was edible, I'd be happy. It was and I am. I'd never made anything close to risotto before today (and I guess technically still haven't) so I'm proud that we got as far as we did. I've also never eaten a purple carrot before! I agree with Nick on how we could have improved the dish by preparing it better but we'll know for next time. I will probably look up terms I'm not certain of rather than charging forward pretending I know what 'medium-high heat' actually means.